How to Find International Influencers

Hannah Ryan, Influencer Outreach Executive at Goat, tells all about how she sourced and managed influencers via our CRM data system for a piece of Formula E video content.

So the idea for the content was that Formula E wanted to really highlight the personalities of the drivers, and Jean-Eric Vergne was the perfect person to do this. He’s really funny and cool, trendy, he’s just really chatty with a great personality. So that was one of the reasons why Formula E wanted to get him involved and to create the video around him so that people can actually relate to him, and see what he’s like behind the track.

So what were you doing in Paris for Formula E?

In the week running up to the day, we found 3 influencers within our CRM database. They had to be in fashion and lifestyle, and we wanted them to be able to speak English because the concept was them sitting in the car, discussing topics such as sustainability and electric cars as an alternative to petrol or diesel cars. Having deep level data like this on the influencers helped us to find the best influencers, very quickly.

How did you find those people?

Well, the database has lots of information on each influencer, so we searched for their features. For example, we wanted them to be from Paris so it was easier for them to get there, so they knew about the city and could convey the essence of the city. So we found quite a big list actually and then broke it down into three tiers, so bronze, silver and gold which we proposed. Bronze was 10,000 – 70,000 followers, 70,000-100,000 was silver and gold influencers were 100,000+. So we selected the three influencers, one guy and two girls, and they all had over 200,000 followers, maybe even over 350,000.

We explained the plan to them and briefed them on the concept. We also gave them some slides with some questions and topics, for example, what they’d be doing in Paris fashion week, what shows they’ll be going to, what they think about sustainability, what they know about Formula E, and then when they sat in the car with Jean-Eric they could ask questions too, such as “What got you into racing?” or “what do you like about Formula E” etc. So we wanted it to be a really natural conversation, building on the influencers genuine interest.

So after this briefing, they all went in the car one-by-one, with earpieces in and they were all chatting. They had cameras all over and inside the car, and so they created content. It was 2 posts in total and 6 stories each, on the day of the event they all over delivered on the stories because they were there and wanted to create content about it.

Do you think it’s an important thing when finding influencers to ensure that they have that authentic passion?

Yes definitely, I think there’s no point in having people who would get there and think, ‘Why am I here, I’m just posting content for the sake of it’. Whereas they actually were really involved and they loved the setup and going in the car. With the girls, I thought, “you’ve got two girls on a motorsports campaign”, and I don’t want to stereotype that only boys like cars, and assign gender roles, but personally I wouldn’t have gotten that excited about riding in an electric car. So I did worry that the girls might have thought “oh, why are we here, why are we doing this?”.

I guess that’s the thing about Formula E, it’s more of an inclusive family-friendly sport versus the other traditional types of motorsports.

Yes, exactly. We have female influencers throughout the whole campaign because we wanted them to create awareness across female audiences as well as the male.

Yes, to make it an inclusive sport?

Exactly. I think that was the reason we got 2 of the female influencers. We could of easily used three males from the system – and maybe their audiences would have related more to the content they were creating, but I think it was cool that they drove around Paris and created stories around their journeys in the car. They did selfies with Jean-Eric Vergne, and the male influencer… he was great; he’d previously gone to Africa and done humanitarian projects while he was there, so he was talking about that in the car. He just really got on with Jean-Eric. Their conversation was so natural and fluid. The girls really enjoyed it and said it was really fun. So, they all posted an image on the day, created content while they were there, said how excited they were and created stories of the car and whilst they were in the car. So that was all on a Wednesday. On the Saturday, the video went live by Formula E. It wasn’t a very long video, only about 1 minute long, and it was a compilation of all of the clips together. I think it was quite successful because we captured Jean-Eric’s personality so well, you can see everyone’s enjoying themselves. On the same Saturday, the influencers each posted another image, and they all had the car in them. They also did two stories on the Saturday encouraging followers to ‘Swipe Up’ and see the video.

⬇️ Check out the video ⬇️

Do you find that’s a really useful feature of insta-stories, especially in influencer marketing?

Yes, I think it is, because you can track the link opens and see how many people actually watched the video through the link. That was cool because it engages the followers. They said in their stories “watch the video to see what I got up to” so that kind of encourages followers to watch it. Normally we do that with the ticket sales, but for this, we didn’t.

So the aim for this campaign was to get more awareness, and convey the driver’s personality?

Yes, so we wanted to drive people to watch the video and get as many views as possible on the video.I think the main aim was to drive awareness of the brand and create a personality around the driver, but also in the long run, to make people want to go to the race- because there will be one in Paris soon. The male influencer, he’s called Rennin, I think he is actually going to the race in Paris. He genuinely loved it and really clicked with the driver and wanted to get to know him.

And there’s that long-term engagement with the brand, rather than using an influencer one-off, do you think it has more value for brands when they reuse an influencer?

Yes, definitely. He showed a real, genuine interest whilst he was there and actually asked us if he could come to the race. I think that will make his followers think “oh he posted about that a few weeks ago, it looks like he genuinely enjoys that”. His content looked very natural, and he made sure it fits with how his content would usually be. For example, he told us that usually he never speaks to the camera saying “Hi guys, check out this thing”. He wouldn’t usually do that, and he stuck to that. So he posted stories with captions and still images, and his views remained the same, and his engagement was all great. Our CRM database helped us predict what his delivery would be, so it was great to see the theory directly related to the results.